Tag Archives: health care

Emotions and Your Spine

When we explain that physical, chemical and emotional stress is the underlying cause of subluxations, many wonder how emotions can cause spinal misalignment.

Yet, our language reveals some common connections.

“I just can’t stand it.”
“He’s a real pain in the neck.”
“She’s cramping my style.”
“My feet are killing me.”Emotions and Your Spine

Our emotions are linked to the meaning we give to situations or circumstances.

For example, for some of us, just the sight of a snake produces fear or aversion. But for others, the same snake is a beautiful reptile to be picked up and held—two very different emotional responses to the same thing!

The Fight or Flight Response

The relationship is complex, but simply put, when we become stressed, our body releases a “fight or flight” hormone called cortisol, influencing muscle tension throughout the body.

When muscles supporting the spine tighten, they can misalign spinal bones, affecting the spinal cord and adjacent nerve roots exiting the spine. After all, bones don’t move unless acted on by muscles, and muscles don’t contract unless commanded by the nervous system.

Our emotional health affects our immune system, increasing our susceptibility to colds and infections during or following emotionally difficult times. And while regular chiropractic care won’t eliminate stress, it may help you to better accommodate it.

Call us for an appointment today!

517.627.4547
Emotions and Your Spine

Our Unique Heritage

America’s Heritageheritage and constitution

America is a unique nation with a unique heritage– founded on the recognition that all people have inalienable rights: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

But what does inalienable mean?

It means that the government doesn’t give us those rights; we have them by right of birth. Our founders understood that our rights are derived from our Creator; they are our natural rights.

The American government was founded to protect our inalienable rights.

Government, kings, potentates, parliaments, committees, politicians, dictators, etc. can take our natural rights away. History is replete with such abuses. The American government was founded to protect our inalienable rights. Government, laws and courts are created to protect those rights. Once our unique constitutional system was put into place, the definition of that principle, and its limits, needed to be understood by all.

For example, in his famous 1790 letter to the Jewish congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, President George Washington went out of his way to set up a critical distinction between a false type of tolerance – by which “one class of people” might condescendingly extend certain privileges to another, inferior class – and the American system, in which all enjoy “their inherent natural rights” equally, provided only that they “demean themselves as good citizens.”

How Does Our Heritage Relate to Healthcare?

The more we give politicians, bureaucrats and “professionals” permission to control and manage our lives, the less free, the more dependent and the less capable we become.

As the Elders of the Oraibi Arizona Hopi Nation remind us:

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

The world-renowned sociologist Ivan Illich, Ph.D. applied this understanding to health in his famous book Medical Nemesis:

A world of optimal and widespread health is obviously a world of minimal and only occasional medical intervention. Healthy people are those who live in healthy homes on a healthy diet in an environment equally fit for birth, growth, work, healing, and dying; they are sustained by a culture that enhances the conscious acceptance of limits to population, of ageing, of  incomplete recovery and ever-imminent death. Healthy people need minimal bureaucratic interference to mate, give birth, share the human condition, and die. (1)

1. Illich I. Medical Nemesis: the Expropriation of Health. New York: Bantam Books, 1977.